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June 18, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
59:58
The Crackdown Begins | Ep. 803
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Time Text
President Trump promises to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
The military prepares to ship a thousand more troops to the Middle East.
And Joe Biden struggles for enthusiasm.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
Well, we have a lot to get to today, a lot of breaking news.
In geopolitical instability news, Iran has announced that it will break the uranium stockpile limit they agreed to under Barack Obama's crap nuclear deal.
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Okay, so the big news today is that President Trump announced via the Twitter that he's going to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
Now, I will say, I do not think that it is a generally good idea for the President of the United States to announce that he's going to deport Millions of people via tweet.
It seems like you should think that one out a little bit more and then, you know, announce a comprehensive policy.
Maybe you should work with your own Department of Homeland Security or Immigration and Customs Enforcement to come up with a comprehensive strategy.
Instead, the president basically just tweeted it out.
So last night he tweeted out, next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal immigrants Now, the last part of this is exactly right.
into the United States.
They will be removed as fast as they come in.
Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people long before they get to our southern border.
Guatemala is getting ready to sign a safe third agreement, which I assume he means safe third party agreement.
The only ones who won't do anything are the Democrats in Congress.
They must vote to get rid of the loopholes and fix asylum.
If so, border crisis will end quickly.
Now, the last part of this is exactly right.
If he's able to get a safe third country agreement out of the Guatemalan government, That's a very good thing.
Basically, what those agreements do is they say if you immigrate, if you move from a country to another country, you don't claim asylum in the United States.
You claim asylum in the country to which you have moved.
We have a safe third party agreement with, for example, Canada.
So if you are attempting to escape a bad home country and you go to Canada, you don't then apply to citizenship in the United States or for asylum rather in the United States.
Instead, you stay in Canada because the idea is you are escaping from a bad place.
You don't get to pick which country you go to.
You get to pick which country you are escaping from.
So if we get that agreement from Guatemala, we've been trying to get such an agreement from Mexico, that would obviously be a very good thing for the United States.
It is also true that arrests on our southern border are in fact dropping.
So whatever pressure Trump has applied to the Mexican government, Credit where credit is due.
That's working.
According to the Washington Post, the number of migrant families crossing the border illegally has been falling in recent weeks, according to preliminary figures from U.S.
Customs and Border Protection, though U.S.
officials say it's too soon to get a full picture of the impact on migration trends from President Trump's deal with Mexico.
Remember, just a couple of weeks ago, the president announced again via tweet that he had reached a deal with the Mexican government.
Whereby they would avoid escalating tariffs by cracking down on illegal immigration traveling up from their southern border to their northern border into the United States.
U.S.
authorities detained more than 85,000 family unit members at the border in May, an average of nearly 2,800 per day.
That number has declined about 13% since the beginning of June.
That's the period during which Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Mexico and the government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, which is a very left government, agreed to an immigration crackdown to avoid the penalty.
According to the Washington Post, U.S.
officials say they are expecting a 15 to 20 percent decline in border arrests from May, when authorities detained more than 144,000 and migration levels reached their highest point since 2006.
The portion of migrants arriving as part of a family group has reached unprecedented levels in recent months, overwhelming U.S.
border authorities who say they are ill-equipped to care for so many parents with children.
They're ill-equipped to prepare for all of that because the Democrats have refused funding, including funding for extra beds at the border.
They're deliberately creating a humanitarian crisis on the border.
The Democrats are in Congress by not granting the funding necessary to make sure that people have livable conditions at the border when they arrive.
The goal, of course, for many Democrats is that those people not having livable conditions should then be released into the interior of the United States.
They tend to show up for their first court date because at that point, all they have to show is that they are willing to show up for a court date, basically, and then If within six months they are not processed, they are given a provisional green card, and then they just overstay their green card and stay in the United States basically forever.
That is the way illegal immigration has tended to work, at least crossing our southern border.
Since the June 7th immigration deal with Trump, Mexico has begun to deploy thousands of National Guard forces to set up a highway checkpoint system and catch more Central American migrants as they head northward toward the U.S.
border.
By the way, it's worthwhile noting the escalation in family units attempting to come into the United States is an attempt to claim asylum.
In other words, it used to be that a huge majority of the people who are crossing our southern border were single men who are trying to come into the United States looking for work, and then they would send money back home.
Maybe eventually they tried to bring their family up.
Now you're seeing families arrive at the border specifically so that they have a more sympathetic asylum claim.
The United States has also begun to send more asylum seekers back across the border into Mexico to await their U.S.
immigration court hearings, which is an expansion of the Migrant Protection Protocols program that prevents the migrants from staying in the United States while they go through the asylum process.
Again, that's an attempt by the Trump administration to stop people from disappearing after they show up for their first court date and just being integrated into America's underground economy.
The Mexican immigration enforcement crackdown has been concentrated in southern Mexico, so U.S.
officials say it could take several weeks for the full effect of the effort to show up as a reduction in crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border.
The United States is hoping that all of this is going to act as a deterrent.
One U.S.
US official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, "We are seeing initial actions.
We are seeing some signs they're having an impact.
I think it's still too early to tell." Board arrests typically surge in the spring.
Board arrests declined 17% from May 2018 to June 2018, an indication that the expected decline this month might not be a result of actually Trump administration policy, but might just be a seasonal thing.
In other words, people are, it's moving into summer, it's harder to illegally immigrate.
That's a lot of territory to cross.
And so it's possible this is a natural decline, not necessarily the result of Trump administration policies.
We will see if that carries forward.
Department of Homeland Security officials say that current migration patterns are less linked to seasonal labor demand than in the past.
Instead, driven by the widespread view in Central America, that those who migrate with children have an opportunity now to gain entry to the United States by taking advantage of legal gaps in the U.S.
border system.
Okay, so all of that is the predicate for the Trump announcement today, when he says that we're going to start removing millions of immigrants who are in the United States illegally.
He did not offer any specifics, did President Trump.
And this is in keeping with President Trump's patchwork, at best, approach to policy, in which he just announces a thing and then hopes his administration backfills it.
He's done this with regard to his policy on transgender folks in the military.
He's done this with regard to executive authority on immigration.
He's done this with regard to trade.
He just announces these broad policies and then expects everybody else to clean up after him.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
It is never well thought out.
Maybe it's all for PR purposes, but that's a pretty stunning announcement that you are simply going to start supporting millions of people How is that going to happen?
I'd like some details.
And it's not just me.
Ann Coulter, who's about as much of an immigration hawk as it is possible to be, she's the one who suggested that if President Trump built a wall, she wouldn't care if he aborted babies in the Oval Office, right?
I mean, she's an immigration hawk.
At the highest level of hawkishness.
She's saying, where are the specifics?
Because she says Trump makes these sorts of announcements all the time on building a border wall, for example, and then there's no border wall.
So what exactly is he going to actually do here?
I want details because I want to know how this is going to be applied.
You know, like I think most Americans, I would like to see illegal immigrants removed from the United States if they are not of benefit to the United States.
I want to see this done on a one by one basis, basically.
I think that people who have been living in the United States for 10, 12 years, been contributing to the United States economy, are not on welfare, for example.
Those folks might be an asset to the United States, and simply dropping them off at the local airport, and having them fly back to their home countries, that might actually really not be the best policy.
It seems to me that illegal immigrants should be processed exactly the same way that legal immigrants are processed.
But if you're a new-coming illegal immigrant, if you crossed the border yesterday, then you being flown back to your home country or you being dropped back off at the border, that seems perfectly reasonable to me as well.
So in other words, I think a case-by-case individualistic approach to illegal immigrants currently living in the country makes a hell of a lot of sense, as opposed to sort of the broad-based Policy just announced by the Trump administration.
Now, I also understand the folks who are saying, well, you're here illegally.
That is a you problem, not a U.S.
government problem.
And so the U.S.
government should be able to deport you.
My point is that there are lots of people in the United States illegally who are in fact contributing to the United States and are people who we would want in the United States if they had immigrated legally.
So some sort of process should be set up for them.
I mean, this particular statement by the president Doesn't actually explain what to do with the so-called dreamers, for example, people who have been here since they were children brought by illegal immigrant parents and have been living here effectively as Americans for the last 20 years.
As I say, those people should be treated on a case-by-case basis.
There is a difference between, obviously, an illegal immigrant who joins the U.S.
military or an illegal immigrant who is in college right now after having gone through the American educational system and is an asset to our economy and an illegal immigrant who committed a crime and is now sitting in a state prison.
Under a deal reached earlier this month, Mexico has agreed to take Central American immigrants seeking asylum in the United States until their cases are heard in U.S.
courts.
The U.S.
Vice President Mike Pence has suggested that Guatemala could receive asylum seekers from its neighbors as a so-called safe third country.
That's exactly what Trump was suggesting today.
Now, the fact is that there is not a lot of bones on this particular proposal, and this is actually part of the problem.
ICE doesn't know exactly what is happening here.
Ice is suggesting that they do not have the resources to deport millions of people.
Ice is suggesting that there's been no guidance from the top down as to what all of this looks like.
We'll get to more of that in just one second.
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Okay, so the Washington Post reports that there has been no direction from top down as to actually what is going on here.
And not only that, there's a bigger problem.
The bigger problem is that Generally, if you are about to launch a wave of arrests, you don't announce that publicly.
It's President Trump who has said that, right?
President Trump says this about foreign policy all the time.
Why would you try to announce your plans?
You want to be unpredictable.
Boom.
Out of nowhere.
The same thing holds true when you are making immigration arrests.
The Washington Post correctly reports, large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets.
In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, California with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.
Now, Trump and Stephen Miller, who is his senior immigration advisor, again, super hawkish, very close with Ann Coulter, have been prodding Homeland Security officials to arrest and remove thousands of family members whose deportation orders were expedited by the Justice Department this year.
Now, all of that is fine.
If the DOJ has already determined somebody should be deported, they should be deported.
The plan is called the Rocket Docket, which has a A catchy title to it.
to it.
In April, Acting ICE Director Ronald Vidiello and Homeland Security Secretary Christian Nielsen were ousted after they hesitated to go forward with the plan, expressing concerns about its preparation, effectiveness, and the risk of public outrage from images of migrant children being taken into custody or separated from their families because, presumably, some of the people and the risk of public outrage from images of migrant children being taken into custody or separated from their families because, presumably, some of How exactly does all of this work?
This is one of the things Trump is going to have to take into consideration.
It's all fun and games until the pictures start hitting the front pages.
And President Trump was fine with a harsh immigration policy until all the pictures started hitting the papers, at which point he backed off a lot of his harsh enforcement policies.
Does he actually have the stomach to go forward with all of this in the run-up to a 2020 election?
Vidiello was replaced at ICE by former FBI and Border Patrol official Mark Morgan, who had impressed the president with statements on cable TV in favor of harsh immigration enforcement measures.
As according to the Washington Post, in his first two weeks on the job at ICE, Morgan has said publicly he plans to beef up interior enforcement And that, of course, is 100% true.
Now, I don't think that the folks at ICE are going out of their way to treat people in an inhumane fashion.
in order to uphold the integrity of the country's legal system.
Okay, and that, of course, is 100% true.
Now, I don't think that the folks at ICE are going out of their way to treat people in an inhumane fashion.
I don't think it's inhumane to deport people who are here illegally if they ought to be deported.
We definitely need to beef up ICE.
I mean, again, it is unclear exactly how all of this is going to be carried out, considering that ice currently has a shortage on the border.
I mean, on the border itself.
Supporters of the plan, including Miller and Morgan and ICE Deputy Director Matthew Albins, have argued forcefully a dramatic and highly publicized operation of this type will send a message to families that are in defiance of deportation orders and could act as a deterrent for future immigration.
That is certainly a possibility.
Well, Democrats, of course, are taking this with just the way you would expect.
They're taking it with all of the sort of nuance and objectivity that is necessary In order for them to make a solid case, leading the way is the illustrious Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.
So fresh, so face, fresh face, fresh face McFace.
She did an Instagram last night while she was folding her laundry or something, in which she suggested that ICE detention centers are like concentration camps.
It's pretty amazing.
The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.
And that is exactly what they are.
They are concentration camps.
And, um, if that doesn't bother you, I don't... I like, we can have, okay, whatever.
I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with Humanity to say that we should not, that never again means something.
Okay, so then she claimed she didn't mean any Nazi references.
This isn't a reference to actual concentration camps, right?
She then tweeted out, for the shrieking Republicans who don't know the difference, concentration camps are not the same as death camps.
Concentration camps are considered by experts as, quote, the mass detention of civilians without trial.
And that's exactly what this administration is doing.
Let me just point out, at the very end of her statement there, she says, never again.
And that is a phrase that was coined in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
She's so radically disingenuous.
So radically disingenuous.
That came right after her tweet in which she said, This is not hyperbole.
This is the conclusion of expert analysis.
And then she links to Esquire.
That's where all the experts are.
Esquire magazine.
So just amazing stuff from AOC.
humanizing conditions and dying.
This is not hyperbole.
This is the conclusion of expert analysis.
And then she links to Esquire.
That's where all the experts are, Esquire magazine.
So just amazing stuff from AOC.
Note to AOC.
It is true that the term concentration camps has sometimes been used, like pre the Holocaust, to refer to mass detention of civilians illegally.
Thank you.
But typically we use that phrase internment camps like the Japanese internment camps.
Concentration camps have come to be associated with death camps because that's what everyone associates them with including you who just said never again when you were talking about all of this.
Don't tell me you're not making a Nazi reference when you are obviously making a Nazi reference.
Well, actually, it's unbelievable.
By the way, when you search concentration camps on Google, I just typed this in a minute ago just to see what comes up.
The very first thing that comes up is Nazi concentration camps.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Chelmno, Dachau.
And then, the next few hits.
Nazi concentration camps from Wikipedia.
Concentration camps 1933 to 1939.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Concentration camps from Britannica.com, internment center for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security.
So even by the more anodyne definition of concentration camps, she is wrong, considering that concentration camps are used for political dissidents, not for people who are breaking the law.
Does she consider American jails concentration camps?
Because those are technically places where we keep people who are civilians and not members of the military for long periods of time.
I mean, it's just absurd.
If you are comparing Border Patrol and ICE to Nazi guards, or hell, if you're comparing this to Japanese internment when we took a bunch of American citizens of Japanese extraction under a Democratic president, FDR, that was the last time we had major internment camps in the United States.
If you're comparing that to illegal immigrants cross the border and then we house them in facilities, and those facilities are short beds because you Democrats won't give beds specifically in an attempt to pressure the release of these people, It's pretty astonishing.
There is a democratic agenda here.
And here is the problem.
Here is the problem.
There is a middle ground on immigration that basically everybody agrees with.
Close the border and then determine what to do with the people here.
Democrats don't agree with either of those propositions right now.
Radical Democrats like AOC.
They don't want to close the border.
They want the border wide open.
And they are not interested in dealing with the people who are here or deporting anyone who is here.
In fact, they want to blanket amnesty for everyone who is here.
Which is why New York is now pushing driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.
New York has done- California has done this already.
The New York State Senate approved a bill on Monday to grant driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, which is- I love this euphemism that is now used by much of the mainstream media.
They've put out rules of engagement for the AP, for example, in which they say you're not supposed to use the terms illegal immigrant or illegal alien.
You're not supposed to use the word illegal at all.
You're supposed to say undocumented.
Well, that's absurd.
If you're an undocumented driver, you are driving illegally.
If you drive without papers, without a driver's license, you are driving illegally.
There are certain things in the United States that require you to go through a legal process.
If you do not do that, you are henceforth doing the thing illegally.
The vote, together with the Assembly's passage last week, thrust New York into the center of an explosive national debate over immigration that would reverse a nearly 20-year-old ban and end years of political paralysis on the issue.
When the last vote was cast just after 8.30 p.m., immigration rights activists erupted into cheers.
It's been an 18-year struggle, said Javier Valdez, the co-executive director of Make the Road New York, a prominent immigrant advocacy group.
The resilience of the immigrant community has shown through once again.
Twelve states and Washington, D.C.
currently allow undocumented immigrants to drive.
But it makes it very difficult for undocumented immigrants to actually have insurance.
So how that works is still up in the air.
Plus, a driver's license gives you access to all sorts of other services that you wouldn't necessarily get if you are an undocumented immigrant.
I mean, this sort of language.
Senator Andrew Guarnades, who is a representative from South Brooklyn, he said, It's not that human beings are illegal.
It's that they have participated in illegal activity.
You know what we call somebody when they commit a felony?
A felon.
It's like, well, no person is a felon because no person is illegal.
What in the nonsense?
We dehumanize and we delegitimize people who are our brothers and sisters in humanity.
It is not dehumanizing someone or delegitimizing someone to say that they have committed a crime or that they are living in violation of the law.
The reason that Democrats are interested in all of this, they made clear over the last few weeks, when they suggested openly, quite openly in fact, that they were in favor of illegal immigrants being counted in the United States Census without regard to immigration characteristics, specifically so that all of the seats in the House of Representatives would be allocated on the basis of non-citizen population as opposed to citizen population, granting Democrats a bunch of seats in areas where they probably would not have seats otherwise.
There's an agenda at play here, and frankly, it is not an agenda that is in concert with the interests of American citizens.
It's disturbing.
And again, it prevents an issue from being solved that pretty much everybody agrees on.
People want a lot of illegal immigrants who are here contributing to the economy, contributing to our culture, making the country better, to go through a legal process and then stay.
And they want people who are not to be deported.
And they want us to control our borders.
Pretty much everyone agrees on this.
Except the far left, which apparently has taken control of the Democratic Party and seeks to create an issue of humanitarian crisis where none really ought to exist.
Okay, we're gonna get to...
The other big story of the day, which is the possibility of conflict with Iran.
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Okay.
So, meanwhile...
The conflict with Iran on the international level continues to militate.
Members of the media continue to basically suggest that Trump is lying us into war, despite the fact that they have provided no evidence that Trump is lying us into war.
In fact, Trump himself said today that he is certainly not interested in any sort of conflict with Iran.
He said it would be one thing if we're talking about conflict over nuclear weapons.
It is another thing if we are talking about, you know, a shipping issue.
Trump does not want conflict.
Trump is by nature more of an isolationist on foreign policy.
Now, Trump also can't be pushed too far.
But in an interview, Trump called the recent tanker attacks very minor.
He said while he would certainly go to war over nuclear weapons, he's less excited about international shipping.
And yet, you're hearing from folks on the left that, no, no, no, Trump is absolutely going to go to war.
He's definitely going to go to war.
I mean, look at this.
We're right on the verge of war.
We're not right on the verge of war.
President Trump has no interest in war.
I'll tell you who has even less interest in war.
The people who have even less interest in war, that would be the folks in Iran.
Because if you are in Iran and you want war, you are an idiot.
Anybody who wants war with the United States, You know, you can push us and push us and push us and push us.
And if you push us too far, then things are going to get very ugly for you extraordinarily quickly.
And yet what you are seeing is a bunch of people who are blaming President Trump for Iranian aggression.
Which is quite insane.
I am not seeing any sort of evidence that it's President Trump's sort of aggressiveness that is pushing Iran here, other than the fact that we have put sanctions on one of the worst regimes on planet Earth, and they are arbitrarily attempting to drive up the price of oil by shutting down shipping straits.
But President Trump is not interested in conflict.
I don't know how many times he can say this.
This is according to Time Magazine, not a friend to President Trump.
He said, I would certainly go over nuclear weapons.
He said, I would keep the other a question mark.
But he said that when it comes to international oil supply, he's like, not really.
Like, really, I want to go to war over this sort of thing?
Trump told Time magazine, the Gulf of Oman is less strategically important for the United States now than it used to be, citing China and Japan as nations that still rely on the region for significant proportions of their oil.
He said, other places get such vast amounts of oil there.
We get very little.
We've made tremendous progress in the last two and a half years in energy.
And when the pipelines get built, we're now an exporter of energy.
So we're not in the position we used to be in the Middle East, where some people would say we were in there for the oil.
He says that he agrees with the U.S.
intelligence community's assessment that Iran was behind the attacks, saying, I don't think too many people don't believe it.
But then he says, if you look at the rhetoric now compared to the days when they were signing that agreement, where it was always death to America, death to America, we'll destroy America, we'll kill America.
I'm not hearing that too much anymore, and I don't expect to.
So President Trump is not looking for conflict here.
I'll tell you that Iran continues to ratchet up the rhetoric because again, Iran is attempting to militate against its own population.
The fact that Iran is a repressive evil regime that cracks down on the human rights of its own citizens and therefore requires this sort of rally around the flag effect by attacking America.
By the way, not uncommon in parts of the radical Muslim world.
Hamas does the same thing with Israel, the Palestinian Authority.
Does the same thing with Israel and the United States as well, by the way.
Well now, Iran is saying that its stockpile of enriched uranium will surpass limits set by the 2015 international nuclear deal 10 days from now, unless European partners in the agreement do more to help it circumvent United States sanctions.
So now they're playing North Korea.
They're basically saying, we are going to simply develop our nuclear stockpile unless you give us money.
And why wouldn't they do that?
It's worked well for North Korea for years.
The international community being filled with feckless dweebs, they've been jumping on the bandwagon, basically saying, oh, please, let's be nice to Iran again.
Then they'll stop with their uranium enrichment.
Well, weird, because I was informed that Iran had dramatically decreased its capacity to develop uranium.
I was.
I mean, that's what they told us, right?
I mean, we were told in the nuclear deal that Iran was going to demobilize a lot of its nuclear equipment.
And yet, weirdly enough, within just a couple of months after the sanctions have really started to take effect, Iran has already mobilized to the extent that they can announce that 10 days from now they are going to be able to spin up their nuclear machines and everything's fine.
Weird.
The announcement made by the spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organization was the first time the Tehran explicitly said it was on track to violate the agreement.
The increase in both quantity and quality of the enriched fuel could shorten the time, currently estimated at one year, that it would take to produce enough for a nuclear weapon.
Well, if you recall, all the way back to the Iran nuclear agreements, there were some of us who were suggesting that this was all just a ploy by the Iranians.
To gain money that they could use to spread terror all over the world, and it would allow them, legally, within ten years, to basically produce a nuclear bomb.
Ten years after the deal expired, ten years and one day, they would have a nuclear weapon.
And then they'd have the money and the nuclear weapon and the regional strength.
And the Obama administration said, no, no, with the money will come moderation.
With the money will come moderation is one of the dumbest arguments, especially in the aftermath of look, look what happened to China.
I truly wonder how many states have been liberalized by the addition of money to their economy.
Making an evil regime richer generally does not make the evil regime go away.
Making an evil regime poor sometimes makes the evil regime go away.
Not always, but sometimes.
Venezuela's evil It's it's not been it was not militated against it was not it was not lessened by the fact that Venezuela was incredibly oil rich.
The USSR, when it was powerful, was a lot more dangerous than when it had been hit by sanctions, when its economy was collapsing in on itself.
China has continued to gain power and credence in Southeast Asia.
They've been pushing into the South China Sea.
They're now threatening Hong Kong.
Millions of people on the streets, and China doesn't care.
They're just going to do what they want in Hong Kong if the United States and other members of the West don't stand up to the Chinese.
That was made available by the fact that the West decided that they were going to quote-unquote liberalize China by allowing China to open its economy to the rest of the world.
Now, I am not a fan of Nixon opening China.
I think that was a mistake.
At the time, there were countervailing considerations.
In a vacuum, it was a mistake.
At the time, there were countervailing considerations like the fact that China and Russia were allies who were trying to split off Mao from the Russian regime because we were trying to collapse the USSR.
All of that I get.
But, in a vacuum, the opening of China, while good for many of China's citizens in terms of living standard, has been absolutely awful in terms of strengthening a horrible, terrible regime.
This idea that we were going to moderate Iran in the same way, that we were just going to throw money at the ayatollahs, and suddenly the ayatollahs would become liberal reformers who are all in favor of Pete Buttigieg or something.
It's just, it's insane, and it was always insane.
And yet, you're hearing people today saying, well, why doesn't Trump just cave to them?
It's Trump's intransigence that's creating all of this.
It's Trump's intransigence.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
First, let's talk about something we can all agree on.
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So in a second, I want to get to a little bit more on this Iran situation.
Again, there's an enormous amount of dishonesty.
That is taking place with regard to the Iran situation people claiming that it's Trump's fault that Iran is is radical.
It's it's really insane.
It's really it's really pretty pretty wild stuff.
We'll get to that in just a second first.
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All righty.
So let's talk a little bit more about this Iran thing.
There are a bunch of conspiracy theories that are floating around.
President Trump, desperate to go to war, deeply wants to go to war.
And all of this is nuts.
Where is the evidence that President Trump is manipulating the intelligence in order to go to war?
I've yet to see any of it.
As I say, yesterday, Adam Schiff, who President Trump despises, President Trump, who Adam Schiff thinks is the worst person ever, is Like, Adam Schiff was saying that Trump is right on the Iran stuff.
So, here's Adam Schiff on Sunday.
There's no question that Iran is behind the attacks.
I think the evidence is very strong and compelling.
In fact, I think this was a class A screw-up by Iran to insert a mine on the ship.
It didn't detonate, they had to go back and retrieve it.
I can imagine there are some Iranian heads rolling for that botched operation.
But nonetheless, the problem is that we are struggling, even in the midst of this solid evidence, to persuade our allies to join us in any kind of a response.
And it shows just how isolated the United States has become.
Okay, well, as Eli Lake writes over at Bloomberg.com, the fact that there are so many members of the European contingent and of the press who keep saying that Trump is responsible for Iranian aggression is actually incentivizing Iranian aggression.
As Eli Lake writes over at Bloomberg, European diplomats are urging Trump to drop his campaign of maximum pressure and adopt one of maximum restraint.
Eli Lake says this is asking to be blackmailed.
Now that Iran is threatening to exceed the limits to uranium enrichment it agreed to in the 2015 nuclear deal, It's more important than ever to understand that restraint and dialogue will not bring Iran to heel.
Start with an obvious point.
Whether it was helping overthrow the government in Yemen or saving Syria's dictator as he gassed his own people, Iran was destabilizing the Middle East even as it negotiated with the West over its nuclear program starting in 2013.
That's one reason why Trump is now trying a maximum pressure approach to get Iran to end its own adventures in the Middle East.
You know, the idea that Trump is desperately looking for war, again, this is just, it's just silly talk.
And it is amazing to me how many members of the intelligentsia are claiming that the intelligence community is now falsifying things.
So the same people who are claiming that Trump was evil for doubting the intelligence community's assessment on Russia, are now saying that when Trump says that the intelligence community is correct about Iran, that the intelligence community is now lying, I guess.
So, it's pretty amazing.
James Clapper, who is A really nefarious figure in the America's intelligence community, the former director of national intelligence under Barack Obama, a deeply political figure who claimed for years that he had secret inside information that Trump was a Russian stooge.
Well, now he's coming out and he's saying the intelligence community is deeply worried about Trump.
Well, the intelligence community.
So let me get this straight.
We should trust them when they're worried about Trump, but we shouldn't trust them when they make an evidentiarily based assessment of whether Iran is behind attacks in the Gulf of Oman.
If the President didn't know about this program with the Russians, assuming the New York Times article is accurate, well, he sure does now.
I do know there are other instances of where there have been concerns about U.S.
intelligence capabilities, particularly when it comes to Russia.
Since there is some mystery about just what exactly what the relationship is, particularly personally, between President Trump and Putin.
So I think it's, you know, can't confirm or deny, but it's certainly plausible.
And I do know there is concern in the intelligence community about that.
It's amazing how intelligence community becomes such a malleable term.
I have generally been in favor of the assessments of the intelligence community.
That was true whether we're talking about the Mueller report, whether we were talking about Iran, whether we're talking about Russia.
I've been pretty consistent in my assessment that the folks in the intelligence community are really doing their best to bring you honest information.
And until shown otherwise, I've tended to doubt the idea that the intelligence community is simply a political tool for whichever administration is in power.
Now, if you can make that argument based on evidence, I'm willing to hear it, but it's amazing to watch as so many people shift their minds on this.
Well, in response to all of this, the United States is sending about a thousand more troops to the Middle East amid tensions over that series of attacks on oil tankers, as according to the UK Telegraph.
Patrick Shanahan, who's the acting U.S.
Defense Secretary, announced the deployment on Monday, explaining that the move was for defensive purposes, citing concerns about a threat from Iran.
He issued a statement.
He said, And the Telegraph reports the series of mysterious attacks on oil tankers have been blamed by the U.S.
credible intelligence we have received on hostile behavior by Iranian forces and their proxy groups that threaten United States personnel and interests across the region.
And the Telegraph reports the series of mysterious attacks on oil tankers have been blamed by the U.S. on Iranian-laid limpet mines.
So again, it's all very mysterious.
It's super mysterious.
General Mohamed Hossein Bagheri, the Chief of the General Staff of Iran's Armed Forces, denied Tehran was involved in the tanker attacks, saying on Monday the country would respond only in an open, strong, and very severe way if needed.
But then he says, if we decided to block the Strait of Hormuz, we will do it in a way that even a drop of oil won't pass the strait.
So yeah, clearly these are folks that we can trust with the global supply of oil.
Meanwhile, as I mentioned, Tehran is now blowing through their ultimatums on nuclear power.
European officials say there appeared to be little hope of reaching a compromise before the Iranian deadline.
If the European states had any cards, I think they would have played them by now.
One diplomat said, if the deal does collapse, I love European media coverage, if the deal does collapse, it will plunge the world back into the uncertainty of the early 2010s.
Oh man, those were terrible.
As opposed to the uncertainty of now when Iran has been backing Syria and Lebanon and Hamas and war in Yemen.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, now there's no uncertainty at all.
I mean, we ended all that uncertainty with magical Obama.
Weird how Iran was able to spin everything up in 10 days.
Yeah, it's true.
I mean, now there's no uncertainty at all.
I mean, we ended all that uncertainty with magical Obama.
Weird how Iran was able to spin everything up in 10 days.
Very, very strange.
So, okay.
Meanwhile, the democratic race continues to unfold.
Joe Biden continues to lead in Democratic primaries.
But the fact is that dude is just not getting the sort of enthusiasm that I think he was expecting.
He's raised some 20 million dollars to this point.
But the average amount that he has raised at this point is fifty five dollars, which is very high.
That means there are a lot of big name donors who are giving a lot of money to Joe Biden.
According to the Washington Post, Biden's divergence from other candidates on display at poverty fighting event.
So he spoke at the poor people's campaign.
And there he outlined a new health care proposal, which would build on the Affordable Care Act by increasing access for lower income people.
But as the Washington Post reports, the former vice president's tack on health care is less sweeping than the Medicare for all plan embraced by some of his Democratic rivals, which they later touted on stage.
The Reverend William Barber II, a founder of the campaign, asked attendees not to cheer or hiss, but rather to greet all the candidates with polite applause.
Even in this subdued setting, however, the response to Biden was noticeably muted.
He left the stage to applause that was less enthusiastic than that which greeted him.
Biden sped through his four-minute opening statement, which ended when Barber cut him off because of time constraints, leaving the former VP halfway through his story about Barack Obama's reaction to the 2015 church shooting.
And then basically Biden went on there up there and just referred to Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama.
He was uninspiring at best and odd at worst.
He's taken this weird tack where he basically suggests that he can negotiate with Republicans in a way that no other Democrat can, waiting to see the evidence of that, considering that the Obama administration passed precisely zero bipartisan legislation.
But here is Joe Biden explaining that we should be able to work with the GOP.
And if we can't, maybe it's time for armed revolution.
There are certain things where it just takes a brass knuckle fight.
If you start off with the notion there's nothing you can do, well, why don't you all go home then, man?
Or let's start a real physical revolution if you're talking about it.
The reason why the rest of the world follows us and we're secure is not because we have the largest military in the world.
It's because we not only lead by the power, the example of our power, but the power of our example.
And you can shame people to do things the right way.
It's really... Okay, you can shame people to do things the right way.
I love that Joe Biden is talking about shaming people.
A shameless human talking about shaming people.
Now, here's the thing.
I think people are actually reading Biden's comment wrong there.
It's calculated to piss off pretty much everybody.
This is why Biden is bad at his job.
Because his comment basically ticks off everyone.
He's saying to the far left, I can negotiate with Republicans, and you guys are radicals, and if you really believe you can't negotiate, then we should just have an armed revolution and fight people in the streets.
So it's calculated to tick off the left by proclaiming that they're irrational.
And it's calculated to tick off the right by suggesting that if they don't cave to his agenda, he's in favor of armed revolution.
Joe Biden, not good at his job.
Also not good at his job.
He continues to go around claiming that his first move is going to be to raise everybody's taxes.
This worked great for Walter Mondale in 1984.
Can't see how it goes wrong for Joe Biden.
We have the greatest income inequity in the history of the United States of America since 1902.
And the fact of the matter is, there is plenty, plenty of money to go around.
The first thing I would do as president was eliminate the president's tax cut.
Okay, so, that is the very first thing you would do, eliminate... That's a thing to run on, I suppose.
It is a thing to run on.
But Joe Biden still has to pander to the woke crowd.
And so he suggests that America is still a deeply discriminatory, horrible place in every possible way.
This is how you try to get the intersectional advocates on board.
He says our policies in America discriminate against everybody.
Like literally every minority is discriminated against by American policy, which begs the question, weren't you vice president for eight years?
I mean, haven't you been a senator since like 1820?
And what have you been doing your whole career, dude?
It's not only that we have less than half the people, almost half the people in the United States living in poverty.
It's ridiculous that we have this extreme, extreme, extreme change that's going on.
Deep inequities in our society.
Our policy discriminates against and devalues black people, Native Americans, people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals, people with disabilities.
I'm going quick because I have four minutes.
Refugees, immigrants, asylum seekers.
They talk about our children.
These aren't somebody else's children.
They're all our children.
So again, America is a deeply terrible, terrible, awful, terrible place.
Thank you, Joe Biden.
So he's giving the wrong messages to everybody.
His candidacy is weak at best.
He's still raising a ton of money because he's very, very famous because he was Barack Obama's vice president.
But it's pretty obvious that the momentum is with Elizabeth Warren at this point.
If you are laying bets, Elizabeth Warren is the place to put your money.
A.B.
Stoddard.
Commentator on MSNBC.
She points out that Elizabeth Warren is climbing in the polls.
This is obvious to anyone who is watching the poll averages.
It's too early to talk about general election polls.
It's not too early to talk about the primary polls.
I think that Biden has crested.
I think that Bernie is falling and Elizabeth Warren is picking up a lot of that support.
Here's AB Stoddard making that point.
What Elizabeth Warren is doing is showing people she really wants this job.
So she's really expressing this hunger that people in small settings in her campaign appearances are responding to.
She doesn't just want to be president.
She wants to do president.
I don't know that President Trump wanted to.
I think he wanted to, you know, win.
But there are days when he doesn't act like he wants to do the job.
Maybe Joe Biden's not showing up enough on the campaign trail.
But her intensity about wanting to actually be president and govern and make all these changes is clearly breaking through.
I mean, the fact is that the media have also been helping her out a ton by pushing her extraordinarily hard.
Chris Matthews, in the meantime, is tearing down Bernie Sanders.
So Chris Matthews, I always say, come in the morning, come out of the show.
Come on here.
Talk about Bernie Sanders.
That guy, his hair's even worse than mine.
Ah, go.
I don't think the Democratic Party wants an ideological candidate.
They want some reforms.
They want to win.
They want to get rid of this guy.
I don't think they particularly want to go radically left and have the government run the economy.
My God, where has that ever worked?
Nowhere in history has a government effectively run an economy.
So I think Bernie's going to lose with his ideology, which he's started to sell.
I think he's crazy to do it.
Nobody wants to hear that old stuff.
Well, I mean, I actually agree with Chris Matthews.
I know, we've come to that point.
So, Joe Biden doesn't have the enthusiasm.
Bernie Sanders falling apart.
Elizabeth Warren is going to be the beneficiary.
They want a partisan victory for the Democrats, and they want a president they're proud of.
They don't want a radical left. - Well, I mean, I actually agree with Chris Matthews.
I know, we've come to that point.
So, Joe Biden doesn't have the enthusiasm.
Bernie Sanders falling apart.
Elizabeth Warren is going to be the beneficiary.
Could this be a Trump-Warren race come 2020?
It is certainly a possibility.
Okay, time for some things I like and then some things that I hate.
So, things that I like.
Brett Easton Ellis is one of the most interesting writers in the country.
He has been for a very long time.
He's also an interesting dude.
And his new book, White, which is basically a series of essays on everything ranging from Hollywood to politics.
is fascinating.
It's really well written, it's really interesting, and it's really kind of contrarian in a wide variety of ways.
He's one of the only people who works in Hollywood who is willing to give an honest assessment of the films in Hollywood and the critics in Hollywood.
It's one of the things that makes him really interesting.
Go pick up a copy of the book "White." It's contrarian in all the right ways.
I find it fascinating.
I think Brett's a fascinating dude.
So go check out White by Brett Easton Ellis.
One of the best books of the year, frankly.
I think it's really good.
It's one of the best kind of Hollywood books I've read in a very, very long time.
Okay, time for a couple of quick things that I hate.
So the thing that I hate, number one, it's always fascinating to me to watch members of the media come out in favor of deplatforming people.
That's always fun.
I'm old enough to remember when the press used to do the quote that was apocryphally attributed to Voltaire that, I may disagree with what you say, but I'll fight for the death to your right to say it.
Not anymore.
Now it's, why won't you deplatform this person I don't like?
So here's Poppy Harlow from CNN trying to push the CEO of Google to actually ban Steven Crowder from YouTube.
YouTube has taken a lot of heat also for these homophobic videos, specifically ones aimed at this Vox journalist that are still on, even after they put out these new guidelines.
I asked him directly, why is that still there, those videos?
Are you going to take them down?
And they're in the middle of reviewing their guidelines again, meeting with outside groups, and they're considering it, but they don't know at this point.
I mean, if this is fundamental to your business, they have to make the decision about where that line is between hate and free speech.
I get it.
I get that they say that less than 1% of the videos stay up, but that's still 9 million videos last year.
It's enormous.
In a quarter.
Okay, so, yeah, the fact that a CNN journalist is pushing for this sort of stuff should be a little bit scary to all of us.
Okay, other things that I hate today.
So this is perhaps the dumbest headline I have ever read.
It is an article by Philip Lamar Cunningham, an assistant professor of media studies at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.
Here is the headline.
25 years ago, O.J.
Simpson showed white Americans just how conditional their comfort with black athletes was.
Well, I feel like you're missing a little part of the story.
You know, the part where he's a murderer.
The part where he killed his ex-wife and Ronald Goldman and then ran away and lied about it and obviously did it.
That's the part that I find a little bit... allegedly.
Okay, that's the part that I find that, you know, like, everybody seemed kind of okay with, like, O.J.
Simpson and commercials and being an athlete and the towering inferno carrying a cat all weird, but it was the point where he sliced off his ex-wife's head.
Allegedly.
It was at that point when I think people are like, you know, I'm off the juices bandwagon.
At this point, I don't really care about his rushing records as much as I care about the fact that he was chopping off his ex-wife's head.
Here's the article.
O.J.
Simpson is back in the news, joining Twitter and promising in a video that he had a little getting even to do.
25 years to the week of his most infamous moment, which is pretty scary.
When O.J.
Simpson comes back on the Twitters and he says he's got some getting even to do, everybody locks their doors.
He's far from the household name he was on the night of June 17th, 1994.
That night, an epic battle between two of the best centers in the National Basketball Association, Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing, was interrupted when NBC shifted to live footage of retired football great O.J.
Simpson fleeing the L.A.
police in a white Ford Bronco driven by his friend Al Callings.
I remember I was very irritated by this because I was watching the NBA Finals at the time.
Only about 8 million viewers watched NBC's coverage of the game.
About 95 million tuned in across networks to see whether a distraught Simpson would surrender, clash with the police, or kill himself.
The car chase, coming in the middle of the fifth game of the NBA Finals, cast a brief pall on what had been a watershed moment for black athletes.
To suggest that Simpson overshadowed a decade's worth of goodwill toward black athletes would be an overstatement.
But Simpson, arguably a major source of this goodwill, certainly made clear the conditions white Americans put on their goodwill, even as the nation's greatest black athletes continue to thrill and amaze.
Well, I mean, I don't really think that my perspective on Hakeem Olajuwon changed dramatically because O.J.
Simpson chopped somebody's head off, allegedly.
I was watching that game, and I don't remember being like, well, now I can't watch the NBA Finals anymore.
I mean, there's Patrick Ewing.
He's black.
And there's Hakeem Olajuwon.
He's black.
And O.J.
Simpson is black.
Therefore, probably all of them are black.
Was there anyone in America who did that?
Because that's not only racist, it's stupid.
What?
But don't worry, this professor has more to say.
He says after years of being criticized for their politics and demeanor, black athletes spent the 1980s gaining recognition primarily for their ability and affability.
And he talks about Muhammad Ali and how Bill Russell and Jim Brown and Lua Alcindor, who was then became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, how they were all very proud and political in the 1960s and 1970s.
And then how they sort of softened themselves in the 1980s.
And then the idea was that there were only certain circumstances under which people were willing to grant credibility to black athletes.
Well, I mean, it's possible that a lot of people just didn't agree with those athletes about, for example, the Vietnam War.
But this article is basically ignoring sort of the key in why people started to not like OJC.
Simpson.
They say, In January 1994, he served as pregame analyst on NBC's Super Bowl broadcast.
He was offensively successful in the months before the Bronco chase.
In January 1994, he served as pregame analyst on NBC's Super Bowl broadcast.
He appeared on his recurring role as Officer Nordberg in the police procedural parody Naked Gun, which was released that March.
He even partnered with singer Gloria Estefan to raise $30 million for spinal cord research.
The bronco chase forced Americans not only to wrestle with the increasing likelihood of Simpson's guilt, but also to recognize that perhaps he was not who they thought he was.
He was not the smiling Petchman running through airports or the frequent victim of comedic violence in Naked Gun.
He was O.J.
and he was black.
Over the years, the Bronco chase has been viewed as a galvanizing moment as a third of the country tuned in to watch the tragedy unfold.
That night, NBC concluded that O.J.
Simpson's fall from grace was important enough to disrupt an epic battle between two of the greatest NBA players of all time.
It was important to note at the time, by the way, the NBA finals were not drawing dramatic ratings.
And you know what did draw dramatic ratings?
A guy who was wanted for murder, one of the most prominent people in America, running from police in the back of a car while telephoning in and explaining that he was about to shoot himself in the head.
Turns out that, I mean, I may have been watching the NBA Finals, but one of those things is a little bit more compelling, TV.
Even though the images themselves were not particularly compelling.
The chase not only disrupted the NBA Finals, says this columnist, it also unsettled the comfort white Americans had developed for black athletes.
No, that's not correct.
The part that unsettled us was not the Bronco chase.
It was the murder.
The dramatic misreading of the OJ case continues to baffle me.
And it does show the racial polarization in the country.
In dramatic ways, the evidence-less sort of assessment of particular cases continues to plague America right now.
It's fascinating.
I had Larry Wilmore on my Sunday special, the comedian from Comedy Central.
You should go listen to it.
It was a really good conversation.
And we were talking about particular incidents of police brutality and racism.
So there was this incident just over the weekend.
In which Phoenix police on tape appear to be dramatically abusing a black man and woman.
Apparently they had a little four year old kid who took a 99 cent doll from like a 99 cent store and the police pulled over this couple and they are abusing them and shouting at them, pointing guns at them.
I mean, it's insane.
It's an insane tape.
And barring some sort of exigent circumstances we don't know about, it is brutal, and those police officers should be fired.
They should have their pensions removed.
I mean, it is really bad.
I mean, it's these folks shouting at this couple that is attempting to comply with the... And then, in their police report, they just ignored all of this sort of stuff.
It's really, really bad stuff.
And it was caught on tape, which is why I'm in favor, and have been for a long time, of officers having body cams on them, because it keeps everybody honest.
So, in other words, there are certain incidents where it's pretty obvious what is going on from the tape itself.
There are certain incidents where it's not obvious and the media covers it in the wrong way.
Michael Brown in Ferguson being a prime example of that exact sort of thing.
But because everybody wants to batten down the hatches with regard to narrative, and this is particularly true when it comes to racial crimes and racial issues, We end up with these bizarre polling statistics on things like Michael Brown, where there's an actual disputed circumstance.
Well, the O.J.
Simpson case is a perfect example of this.
So if you actually look at the opinions between black folks and white folks on O.J.
Simpson, right from the outset, a vast majority of white people thought that O.J.
Simpson was guilty.
The reason being O.J.
Simpson was absolutely guilty.
There is no question that he was guilty.
I mean, all the evidence is that he was guilty.
All of it.
There's not a shred of evidence that O.J.
Simpson was innocent in that case.
None.
So, white people immediately thought that O.J.
Simpson was guilty.
Now, that could be reflective of supposed white racism, or it could be reflective of the evidence in a particular case.
One of the things that you will see in, for example, the Michael Brown case, is that the initial polls showed that white people said they didn't have enough information to know what had happened, and black people suggested, by and large, that this was a racial killing.
Well, in the O.J.
case, the vast majority of black people initially said that O.J.
Simpson that O.J. Simpson was innocent.
So 75% of white Americans said that O.J. was guilty.
That has now risen to something like 90% of white Americans.
73% or 72% of black Americans said that O.J. was not guilty at the exact same time.
I mean, you have to forcibly ignore evidence to do that.
But again, if narrative is more important than evidence, this holds true for every race.
If narrative is more important than evidence, then you have failed the basic test of common decency.
Evidence ought to trump narrative, obviously.
And now it has, right?
Over the years, a majority of black folks, now about 55%, say that O.J.
is guilty.
Shockingly, still 27% of black folks somewhere in that neighborhood, 25% of black folks, still say that O.J.
was innocent, which is pretty amazing.
Why the shift?
So, 538 says, developments in the murder trial and events in Simpson's life probably have played a role.
Or, alternatively, it was a very, very fraught time, and people decided to take an incident and shift it into the narrative.
This is after Rodney King.
They decided to put this into the middle of a narrative, as opposed to looking at the evidence on its face.
And afterward, it's a lot easier to assess the evidence on its face.
The question is, if you're a decent person, can you assess evidence on its face When you first see it, or do you have to wait for the narrative to emerge and then be defeated over time?
OK, we'll be back here a little bit later today with two additional hours.
Otherwise, we'll see you back here tomorrow.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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Executive Producer, Jeremy Boring.
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Audio is mixed by Mike Koromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show is a Daily Wire production.
Copyright Daily Wire 2019.
President Trump announces plans to deport millions of illegal aliens.
It seems to me I've heard that song before.
Then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accuses the United States of holding illegal aliens in concentration camps, just like the Holocaust.
And finally, the Washington Post identifies the real reason white America became distrustful of O.J.
Simpson.
Hint, it's not because he murdered his ex-wife.
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